On October 31, our class went on a field trip. First part of our field trip was a lecture at University of Toronto where we had a chance to meet several professors and hear their inspirational stories about the hardships they fought through to be in their current positions. Second part of our field trip was a fun adventure and experience at the ROM: Royal Ontario Museum.
This was our tour guide at ROM who told us a lot of fascinating stories of the animals kept in the museum. According to our tour guide, not all the animals kept in the museum are real and instead just synthetic models of the real ones since some of them are really difficult to catch or very difficult to preserve them in their original state.
These largest grey owls in Canada are one of the animals in the museum that were real.
We wondered why such common animals like pigeons would be preserved in a museum. Then we learned that these were passenger pigeons. Passenger pigeons were once very abundant in population. There were about 3 billion to 5 billion at the time when Europeans discovered America. However, due to its abundance in number, humans began overhunting which led to a crash in the population of passenger pigeons. Since passenger pigeons were colonial and gregarious birds which needed large numbers for survival and breeding conditions, the small population of these pigeons weakened and eventually died. The last passenger pigeon to live was Martha and this display of passenger pigeons are due to its 100th anniversary since its extinction.
One of the most interesting fact I have learned is the strange way these angler fishes, in the picture above, develop their reproductive organs. It is known that from birth, a male angler fish is small, weak and can barely find food. However, with a great sense of smell, the male angler fish eventually finds a female angler fish due to her pheromone. Unlike the male angler fish, the female angler fish is huge, vicious and can lure other fishes using a glowing spine on top of its head and can devour a prey twice her size. When the male sees the female angler fish, he starts biting her for nutrition and eventually fuse into the female's body with only its reproductive organs left on the female's body which the female uses later to impregnate herself. The picture above on the left is a female angler fish.
A whale with interesting appearance were found, hung on the ceiling of the museum, known as the narwhal. With its enormous size, this type of whale has a tusk, a horn-like structure growing forward from the left side or the right side of its upper incisor tooth about 2 meters long. The use of this horn was told to be in mating battles. Male narwhals have been observed rubbing their tusks together, interpreted to be a cetacean "fencing." The narwhal tusks are also filled with sensory nerves which provides the whale with information about the water temperature, pressure, and salinity.
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